Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Freeburg, IL

Freeburg is a village in St. Clair County, Illinois, within Greater St. Louis, about 20 miles southeast of downtown St. Louis, and many of its residents commute to St. Louis or the Belleville area.

Freeburg was platted in 1836 as the town of Urbana by settlers whose families had come from Virginia, and its earliest European settlers were of English and Irish ancestry.

When Freeburg's post office arrived in 1851, residents learned another Illinois town already used the name Urbana, so in 1859 they renamed the town Freeburg after Freiburg in Baden, Germany, the homeland of some early settlers.

Large-scale German immigration to the Freeburg area began around 1830, drawn by coal deposits, cheap fertile farmland and the nearby frontier city of St. Louis.

Freeburg was incorporated in 1867 with 808 residents, and the railroad arrived in 1869 on a line that eventually became part of the Illinois Central.

In the heyday of Freeburg's independent coal mines, as many as 1,500 miners lived in the village, and in 1874 there were 10 hotels serving them.

Peabody's River King Mine, a 2,000-acre coal mine just east of Freeburg, operated from 1957 until 1989, and in 1994 Peabody donated about 1,800 acres of the site to the state, creating the Peabody-River King State Fish and Wildlife Area.

In the 1850s a plank road linked Freeburg to Belleville, charging travelers 35 cents for a smooth ride, and Abraham Lincoln is said to have traveled the road at least once.

The 2020 census counted 4,582 residents in Freeburg in 1,760 households, with a median age of 43.3 years.

Despite its suburban growth near Belleville and Fairview Heights, the Census Bureau still classified 100 percent of Freeburg's residents as rural in 2020.